Three themes cut across all A4NH work, surfacing in each of the flagships and creating common threads in A4NH's efforts to realize the potential of agricultural development to improve the health and nutrition of people worldwide. To learn more about these themes, which are carried out in units, click on the links in the brief descriptions below.
The Country Coordination and Engagement (CCE) unit improves the efficiency of conducting research by formalizing ways we partner to coordinate research, link to development implementers, and share information between A4NH flagships, as well as between A4NH and national partners working across agriculture, nutrition, and health in select countries. The unit is made up of five in-country research teams comprised of flagship representatives in the five A4NH focus countries: Bangladesh, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, and Vietnam.
This unit also serves as a link between A4NH and the CGIAR Site Integration process, an initiative to help the CGIAR system work, think, coordinate, and collaborate more like a system rather than as separate, independent organizations. Site integration is being carried out in 20 priority countries.
The Gender, Equity and Empowerment (GEE) unit ensures that gender and equity are integrated into A4NH research and activities, as gender is widely recognized as an integral part of the different systems of agriculture, nutrition, and health. Women's roles in household decisions have varying effects on agricultural outcomes and on the health and nutritional status of household members, and are therefore fundamental to A4NH research and impact.
Moreover, all flagships expect their research to contribute to CGIAR-designated outcomes, such as gender equitable control of productive assets and resources and improved capacity of women and young people to participate in decisionmaking. The GEE unit adds expertise and strengthens capacity across both A4NH and CGIAR to reach these goals.
The GEE unit also hosts the Gender-Nutrition Idea Exchange (GNIE) Blog, which provides stakeholders a place to learn from one another and share ideas.
The Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) unit supports results-based management and learning, driven by the A4NH theories of change. The MEL unit helps each flagship develop and refine a set of impact pathways. Using impact pathways provides more detail on the causal chain from specific outputs and related activities to outcomes and helps flagship teams to identify and assess the assumptions and risks that underlie anticipated linkages in the sequence of outcomes. The MEL unit uses these theories of change tools to support management and monitoring of the flagships. The MEL unit also coordinates the growing portfolio of external evaluations and reviews of different aspects of A4NH's work.
